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The Big Stories Behind Small Seeds: This Man Wants To Save Them All

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The modern farm-to-table movement has renewed interest in heirloom fruits and vegetables. But long before the trend, John Coykendall has been on a mission to preserve rare heirloom seeds and document their heritage.

“We lost so much over time. That’s why it’s so important now to save what’s left,” says Coykendall, the master gardener at the luxurious mountain retreat Blackberry Farm in his native Tennessee.

Coykendall has more than 500 varieties gathered from small farmers and backyard gardeners around the world. The bulk of his collection comes from the American South — Appalachia and here in rural Washington Parish, La., near the Mississippi state line.

“It’s the unique sense of place that you find here,” he says. “They’ve retained their sense of integrity, character, way of life, farming ways.”

On a recent visit, he stopped by the Circle T Feed and Seed in Franklinton, La.

“For me it’s especially the seed,” he says, walking straight to the back of the store to an aisle of cardboard bins filled with vegetable seeds.

Dressed in denim overalls, Coykendall rummages through the seed sacks looking for varieties you can only find here — like the Louisiana purple pod bean.

“It makes a pretty bean — beautiful display growing,” he says. “The pods are solid purple but when you cook these, once the steam hits them, they turn green again.”

Coykendall is like a walking, talking seed catalogue. For nearly half a century, he’s been collecting seeds and the stories of the people who grow them.

Coykendall keeps detailed journals of all of his seed expeditions, something he calls “memory banking.”

“A little bit of ancestral history,” he explains. “Where you were living? Where did this seed come from? Did it come from your grandmother or grandfather? Was it brought here from somewhere else? How do you grow it? How was it cooked?”

He’s a trained artist as well as a seed preservationist, so the journal entries include lovely drawings of the seeds, their plants and the surrounding landscape.

“They’re little artifacts, each one of them,” says Louisiana producer Christina Melton. She’s helping Coykendall organize his journals into a book. There are more than a hundred of them.

“It’s something that that is a real resource for people in trying to re-establish people’s ties to the food that they eat,” she says.